*see also: comedy, musicals, pantos, improv ... just all around great theatre.

08 October 2012

The Truth Game: “The Truth is not always that simple".

Playwright Simon Cunliffe tells drama on the waterfront about the inspiration for The Truth Game.

Playwright Simon Cunliffe. Photo by Paul McLaughlin.

I didn’t formally become a “journalist’’ until I was in my
early 30s. And by that time – the mid-80s – I had lived, travelled and worked
in various capacities across the world:
plastics factory labourer in Christchurch;
mine worker in Northern Australia; aid convoy
driver in Kenya;
development project tutor in Sudan,
hotel assistant in France;
warehouse man and cheesemaker in London
…

So you could say I brought something of an outsider’s gaze
to the profession even as I embraced it and immersed myself in its intriguing
milieu. For the next-to-penniless would-be
writer I was striving to become, it offered a good income and the opportunity
to hone my craft. And though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, it began to
throw up colourful characters and dramatic possibilities that would, a couple
of decades on, seep into a play I had begun to write.

By about 1987, I found myself working casually at the Mirror
Group in London.
Its buildings straddled New Fetter
Lane, just off Holborn Circus, which ran down to
Fleet Street. Two of them were connected by a glass covered walkway above the
street. It joined the satellite offices in which my colleagues and I worked to
the labyrinthine maze opposite. This larger complex housed the newsroom of the
Sunday Mirror. From the upper floors the magnate Robert Maxwell cast a sort of
malevolent pall of dis-ease over his
empire below.

It was the sort of building in which you could get lost.
Indeed, it was here I first encountered that apocryphal tale of the editorial
writer who, disoriented by the introduction of computers, was dispatched with
his typewriter to “Siberia’’, an office on the dark side of a dark building
which ordinarily you needed a road map to find -- and in which the
editorialist’s crumbling cadaver was discovered a year or two later.

Below the offices of the Sunday Mirror Magazine, the launch
of which I had been recruited to assist, there was a pub. It was dark, dank
with stale beer and tobacco. Whorls of cigarette smoke hung in the air, illuminated
by the occasional suffused shaft of light. A den of intrigue and internecine
office politics, it was known as “The Stab’’ – short for “The Stab in the
Back’’. Here information was bought with
a bevvy, liaisons initiated, careers begun and ended.

“Watch yours,’’ my chief sub used to tell me as we adjourned
for a pint of IPA. He was a gentleman,
middle-aged, kind and learned, but, like that long-lost editorial writer,
bewildered by the change that had overtaken his industry. For him, it was the
end of the era. For me, eventually inheriting his job, it was just the
beginning.

From his yacht anchored somewhere in the eastern
Mediterranean Maxwell called up one day and demanded of a subordinate: “Sign
three sub-editors!’’ Wishing neither to
delay nor disappoint, the man shoulder-tapped the first three people who hove
into view. I could have been the cleaner for all he knew; two or three years
earlier, I probably had been.

I plunged into it with all the gratitude and zeal of the
saved, regularly pinching myself. I drank in the lore, the stories, the conduct
– hungrily. It seemed impossibly exotic: the two alpha male sub-editors
bloodying each other’s noses over the placement of a serial comma; the editorial “executives’’, back from a
five-hour lunch, exorcising their booze-induced lust in the women’s loo, a
crowd of office eavesdroppers cheering
them on.

I moved on to The Independent, still in its heyday. Here,
the diversions were of a different order –
even the sex was more literary -- but in their own way, equally
colourful. Half expecting to be found
out, and as insurance against that eventuality, I began acquiring
keepsakes: collecting incidents and
observations like a magpie nicking shiny
trinkets, and filing them away in a slot called memory.

******

One of the central conceits of my contemporary drama, The
Truth Game, is that all the crises of the age come to a head during one night’s
production of a fictional daily, The Advocate. It is in fact haunted by, though
not based on, ghosts of people, places and events encountered over almost three
decades in journalism.

In 1994, I returned to New Zealand, initially as a feature
writer on The Press in Christchurch,
a solid if somewhat conservative metropolitan broadsheet which had been recently
taken over by the Murdoch-dominated Independent Newspapers Limited. A culture
of “change management’’ was afoot in which, in increasingly senior roles, I
played my eager part. But by the time I resigned as deputy editor at the end of
2002, small misgivings about the business of journalism had begun to gather.

It was these that got me started on the play, following a
move to Dunedin.
I began hawking round early versions of the script in about 2006, rewriting
over the next few years as readings and workshops prompted advice from all
quarters on how to construct the perfect drama. I was, initially at least, just
as anxious that by the time it reached the stage, the fictional newsroom I had
created, and the concerns of its inhabitants, would be laughably dated.

I was at that time fortunate to meet director Danny
Mulheron, to whom the existence of this play owes a great deal. He loved
newspapers; he loved the script, even in its earliest guise. He simply said:
don’t worry, good things take time. We’ll get this play on.

He was as good as his word.

*****

At the heart of The
Truth Game is Frank Stone, “the last great snorting warhorse of print
journalism’’. Acting editor of daily
newspaper The Advocate, recently
taken over by an international media company, he is an old-style print warrior
for “truth’’, grammatical correctness and the watchdog role of “the Fourth Estate’’
– who finds himself at odds with his paper’s corporate masters.

While all around
him marketers, managers and disciples of the new digital media – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – peddle their
pervasive dedication to focus groups, loose-lipped trivia and the bottom line,
Frank tries to reconcile the colliding demands of principle and personal aspiration, while
confronting the demons of his messy past, and mounting a rear-guard action for
the very “soul’’ of news. Ambition, loyalty, love and betrayal act upon his
careering orbit and on those surrounding him.

*****

There is an old and clichéd piece of advice given to
would-be authors: write about what you know. But, paradoxically, knowing too
much can be a hindrance. Feedback on early drafts from journalists -- “just like a documentary’’ -- and others, tended to confirm this. I also
had to be reminded I wasn’t writing for my colleagues: they would form a tiny
percentage of the potential audience.

The challenge was to turn my subject into compelling drama.
And this meant learning about dramatic structure -- one not greatly informed by
the exigencies of daily newspaper journalism. Sophisticated narrative form and
feature writing apart, news reportage requires the conveyance of as much
information as possible in the most economical way -- leaving nothing to chance
and even less to suspense. On the other hand, newspapers and theatre both thrive
on crises and conflict – it’s just that good drama offers its delayed
gratifications in a series of stages as it drives towards climax and
resolution.

I wanted to write a play set in a traditional newsroom
besieged by the “crises’’ of the age --
before that newsroom disappeared entirely. In part this was to be an
affectionate valediction, but also an interrogation of the confused and
diffused role of the Fourth Estate in contemporary democracy. For if a
well-functioning democracy requires the transparent and untrammelled passage of
information – of “truth’’ – through the
media to the people, it is arguable that, assailed by a perfect storm of falling circulation and splintered ad
revenues, debt loading, changing ownership patterns and digital consumption, that role has been increasingly
compromised.

That’s the columnist and editorial writer in me: the now
traditional newspaper man in control of his material who assembles facts and
opinions and relays them – matter-of-factly. The dramatist within knows,
however, that the theatrical substrate and the characters created don’t always
want to play ball. They challenge you constantly, and haul you off in
directions you might not have anticipated.

In his powerful indictment of the modern media, Flat Earth News, Guardian journalist
Nick Davies suggests more than once that telling the truth is the proper
business of journalism. But as even Frank Stone, its greatest advocate, is at
one point forced to concede, “The Truth is not always that simple".

If it were, I suspect The
Truth Game would never have been written, much less produced.

Simon Cunliffe

October 2012

The Truth Game opens on Saturday, 13 October with $25 Specials on Sunday, 14 October and Tuesday, 16 October. To book, please call the Circa Box Office on 801-7992 or visit www.circa.co.nz.